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> Or in 2022-2023 EU leaders said that Russian soldiers are fighting with shovels and stealing microwaves and washing machines to extract microchips from them.

And this WAS true. At one point, Ukraine broke through Russian lines and was pushing Russia back as fast as they could get logistics organized.

In response, Russia mobilized about 300000 people and forced them to fight or die. Usually both. Then started offering jailed inmates a chance of freedom by fighting on the front lines for 6 months. It invited freaking North Koreans to fight on the Ukrainian front!

> Written by the people who had no clue how to distinguish Russian tank from Ukrainian tank.

The thing is, in a large war such as the Ukrainian war (or the Iranian war now) you can have multiple total routs of the opposing military. And still not gain anything. The opposing military can be armed with shovels and they might be formed out of the dregs of society, but as long as they hold the line, they can still stop your advance.


> Pure Na-ion probably isn't viable and certainly isn't viable in a car.

You're saying: https://insideevs.com/news/786509/catl-changan-worlds-first-... ?


Just wait until you find out about hydrogen sulfide from overcharged car batteries.

Also, I think HCN can be scrubbed by adding a special absorptive cap onto the battery.


Or you could just have the batteries in a separate enclosure away from your house. I think I would be inclined to do this anyway, certainly for Lithium batteries given the possibility of fire.

hydrogen sulfide is not anywhere in the same category. When you consider failure you have to consider what is the most catastrophic possibility and if that is “this battery silently kills people” then you dont make it.

Batteries with Prussian blue cannot kill people silently.

Cyanide could be released only at high temperatures, e.g. if the battery is opened and burned, not during normal operation, even if overcharging is not prevented, as it should.

The sulfuric acid from the traditional lead-acid car batteries is more dangerous than this.


We pipe methane into millions of homes. I don't think "this can silently kill people in the worst case" is enough to block something.

We also have to adulterate that methane with bitter smelling agents too warn people of the danger when there's a leak. The line into the house is also limited by a regulator to ensure the pressure is very low. If gas builds up in a battery, it's either going to leak out slowly or build up and leak out all at once.

Very much not an equal comparison.


What the other poster said about the risk of releasing cyanide during overcharging is not true.

Cyanide could be released only at high temperatures over 300 Celsius degrees.

During a fire, there are many other things in a car that can release toxic fumes easier than a sealed battery.


The methane is almost always piped in to be burned, and that can easily create odorless carbon monoxide. And the smell is not foolproof either. This does routinely kill people and we keep doing it. The jurisdictions that are banning it are doing so because of environmental reasons, not safety.

> hydrogen sulfide is not anywhere in the same category.

It has the same LD50 dose as HCN. It literally _is_ just as bad. It routinely kills people on oil rigs because in lethal concentrations it immediately shuts off your nose.

How often do you hear about people getting poisoned by it from lead-acid batteries?


Not precisely the same:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_cyanide - 107 ppm (human, 10 min)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide - 600 ppm (human, 30 min)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide - 4000 ppm (human, 30 min)

These are "LCLo" values from the databoxes on those pages. More easily comparable numbers may be around somewhere.


Hydrogen cyanide has the bonus of being mostly odorless too. Whereas hydrogen sulfide is distinctly bad smelling.

Apparently it only smells bad if you have non-lethal concentration.

The only people with any significant amount of lead acid batteries on their property are off grid types who typically store them away from their primary domicile as a fire safety precaution.

Fast charging a car/chemical weapon in your garage isn't terribly appealing.


If that battery is a chemical weapon then so is a big half-plastic box with ten gallons of gasoline inside.

Just remember, the US Na-Ion battery startup died last year with _products_ _in_ _warehouses_ just because it couldn't get a UL certification. All it needed was a bridge loan.

And the government did nothing.


>And the government did nothing.

Why didn't a private investment company, even venture capital, extend them a bridge loan? It seems like the type of technology that could have decent returns in licensing fees.

I ask this question because it seems odd to someone in the software world so flooded with startups that the government would be expected to intercede on behalf of a startup.


To a first approximation, an inability to get UL certification means a product failed to demonstrate compliance with well established safety expectations…technically it means the insurance industry will not treat it as ordinary risk.

The ramifications range from inability to obtain product liability insurance for manufacturers, the voiding of general liability for users, and the fire marshal shutting down places where the system is installed.

Keep in mind that new products get listed under new standards developed by manufacturers all the time. But only when the new standard demonstrates ordinary safety.

The simplest likely explanation is that vc did not believe the technology was worth betting on.


In this case, Natron was focused on energy-storage for data centers, a sector which is ordinarily a prime recipient of government intervention.

While this article is about cars, there is another Chinese company that offers 50 MWh sodium-ion batteries for stationary energy storage.

While for cars sodium-ion batteries will never reach the energy per kilogram of the best lithium-ion batteries, for stationary use it makes absolutely no sense to use lithium batteries, because sodium batteries will become much cheaper when their production will be more mature, so they should always be preferred to lithium batteries.

Even for cars, sodium-ion batteries have a second advantage besides price, they retain their capacity and their charging speed down to much lower temperatures than lithium-ion batteries, so they will be preferred in cold climates.


Apparently, there were shenanigans from investors/creditors. So the company got quietly carved up instead of going through a bankruptcy auction.

I'm looking forward to the eventual investigational report.

BTW, the company was Natron Energy.


Decent returns aren't enough for a risky investment, they need to be spectacular returns.

The benefit to the country as a whole is potentially large, but most of it wouldn't show up as profit for the company itself. I'm sure it would do quite well if it was successful, but the benefits to car manufacturers and to having this sort of technology on-shore would not translate into monetary returns on private investment. That's the sort of thing government intervention is good for.


Starting to think that the American century of humiliation meme was prophetic.

Which company?

One could argue that in that case, doing nothing was very much a choice.

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake"

Think not,'what can my country do for me?', but, 'How can I further enrich Trump'

Signal mask? What century are we in?

It can be safely ignored for the vast majority of apps. If you're using multithreading (quite likely if you're doing coroutines), then signals are not a good fit anyway.


Aside from the fact that the signal mask is still relevant in 2026 and even for multithreaded programs, that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that POSIX requires swapcontext to preserve it.

In most cases you're already using signalfd in places where libdex runs.

Raw OpenVPN is very easy to distinguish, its handshake signature is very different from the regular TLS.

OpenVPN is fine if you want to tunnel through a hotel network that blocks UDP, but it's useless if you want to defeat the Great China Firewall or similar blocks.


You can listen to the ATC recordings before and after the accident.

Does someone say there is only one controller working? Just because that particular recording has only one controller doesn't mean nobody else is working.

You can hear him directing ground and air traffic.

What is _really_ needed is a replacement of the archaic narrowband analog FM radio. Where you can't listen and talk at the same time. There are probably at least several dozen accidents where the inability to communicate with an aircraft or a road vehicle was a contributing factor.

I would settle for a good digital system with an ability to issue emergency/priority calls to specific receivers. Oh, and full-duplex communication.

I'm practicing for a sports pilot license, and I really have problems with understanding other pilots and the ATC.


Not only that, if 2 people talk at once they can cancel each other out and neither can be heard by anyone else.

Much of aviation is still based on pre WWII tech and practices like this and people underestimate how slow and difficult it is to change. Many piston aircraft still run on leaded gas, for example, the last existing market for it in the US.


> Imagine it were 90% automated.

It already is.

> Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.

Planes divert to another airport, passengers grumble, end of story. Airport closures can and do happen all the time for all kinds of reasons, including weather or equipment malfunctions.


Except when the system fails regionally.

Then all the takeoffs will be cancelled, immediately reducing the workload, and planes will be manually landed.

For S3 emulation, I'm using rustfs. It's very compact and fast to run, and you can just start it with `docker run` inside tests if you don't want to set up a full integration test harness.

I used an SQS-on-top-of-Redis emulation before, but I can't recommended it now (no updates for 6 years).


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